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As he smelled his fingers again, beyond the many shades of her unwillingness, indecision, acquiescence and regret, he could smell mangoes and summer.

The thought of mangoes brought to him the pain of loss. As summers approached after the season of dandelion, the air smelled of mangoes, first that of the watery ones and then that of the fleshy ones. The more watery ones, muttikkudiyan, are the ones you tap on the ground, punch a small hole on to it with your teeth, and suck it in, as the juice drips through the corner of your lips, to your checkered oversized shirts, to remain as a stain there, one among the many similar ones of blood and snot and the orange ice candy at Abu’s shop.

The more fleshy ones were always a more communal than individual experience. In the evenings when the sky turned violet, the young ones from the house stood guard, hiding behind the plantain leaves. The children from across the main road came under those violet skies to steal the fleshy mangoes, muvandan, tathamma chundan… He always enjoyed when the fired the first stones on those hapless kids, still in their white shirts and green trousers or skirts waiting all this time after school for the shimmering violet sky to arrive that they could find alibis in the ghosts of children drowned in the nearby pond. Ghosts never fled that neighborhood, but those children, Dineshan, Seinaba, Muthu, Kunjon, Malu, they all did, under the raining stones and calls of animals they detested.

In the afternoons when he and the others gathered around their grandmother as she sliced the mangoes, their fathers and uncles and occasional guests from distant relatives sipped milk tea and discussed politics and intra religious rivalry and the true meaning of Oneness of God and whether or not women can enter mosques and the doctor in the neighboring village who can cure cancer. When only the seeds were left one of them would give an alarm cry. A concerned uncle or aunt or a neighbor who had just come to fetch water from the only non-dried up well responded, “What happened?”

“Please stand guard for this mango seed” the children burst out in laughter, as grandmother chided them for their irreverent behavior.

The mango season was gone for long now. The floods from the sky turned the mango flowers deep brown and then black and dead. The years brought most of all, empathy with those fleeing children, rationality against the drowned ghosts and partition between uncles and aunts and mango plots. Worst, it brought him the stubbles on his chin and the cigarette in his hands.

He tried smelling those fingers again. Beyond the maze of her smiles at the corner of her lips, fear in her eyes and the deep redness on her nose, he could smell the smoke in his own eyes.

As she tried swinging herself in her grandfather’s rocking chair, Suhra scattered into hallucinations where her grandfather’s snores from the next room turned themselves into words, and the words into bullock carts and contorted faces; a world which she ever often visited but could barely reconstruct even when the contortions of the real world with its unintelligible language, the unpredictable fists of laughter, rage and numbness and the confusion of ages her uncles succumbed to yearned for a story that she could say to herself. This was Suhra’s own world, and she couldn’t bear it. Everyday she wished for an intruder, for someone to penetrate her secret world, secret not by any jealous intentions but by the cruel coincidence of being torn apart from the rest by a language which was abnormal, not shared.

Her uncles defied the generations by their laughter, by their howls. They scratched on all the wooden surfaces of the house, fought with each other and the invisible enemies, chatted with the djinns, plotted with Satan. They were for Suhra caught in act in their own long monoacts, and each one presented all the moods. They were for Suhra inscribed in every setting sun and every shrieking cricket, in every drop of the fresh rain of every year-tidings of an end and promises of a future but ever caught in roles nullifying each other and themselves. Others say they are mad; and she couldn’t decide if mixing up of ages, places and characters was insanity or just a game that just went too long because her grandfather forgot to terrorise them of the creatures of the night that haunts every child who plays in the courtyard at the dusk.

Bullock carts frequented her hallucinations. There was a bullock cart everywhere in that house- when her uncles would go, in their varied timings, into the crawling years of their childhood; in each coconut that were thrown to the coconut room every time the plucker was benevolent by his presence; when her grandfather, dead except for his snores at the siesta time and his demands for black tea at the waking hours, would then narrate the story of a long journey which was the beginning of it all.

Neighbours avoided visiting that house. The few times she overheard them, “god” punctuated the few sounds that were spoken as frequently as their sighs. But they all did utter “the bullock cart driver”.
“a driver’s luck, what God wishes…”
“the luck to run a long way, God alone the giver of all the good and the bad”
“the driver who travelled a long way”
“Marakkar doesn’t actually deserve so much, …God’s test I tell you.”

She was not out of their conversation either. “God protect her, it’s a girl”
“Heir to a treasure, but what to do, whatever God wishes, happens.” She had heard enough of the treasure already. What intrigued her was its location. It can’t be in this house, she knows every nook and corner of it. She has upturned the hearth, dipped the sandbag in the chimney an extra time each time she had to clean it off its smoke with the hope that a bag –a yellow silk bundle of gold and diamonds-might just be pushed to sight by an extra push. She emptied the overflowing coconut room but all she could find was the snake skin peels. She even made Kanaran dig a few more pits last week in the pretence of planting a few extra plantain. ‘But it’s not the season’ he reasoned, but soon succumbed to the girl’s wish. He too knew of lanes beyond reason’s beat.

But what did she need the treasure for? What will it fetch her which she is in dearth of? No one was going to accept her –the figment of sanity waiting to be flooded by the madness around her, the focus of many a story of djinns and seas and bullock carts, the magic word that evoked piety at the tea stalls and the women-quarters. She was just too painfully sane, realizing all of it by herself. She was beautiful, the bedroom mirror said so; she was sweet, or how else could she be loving the rains; and she was fourteen, and was as good since she was nine.

As she swung herself into the multitude of her hallucinations, she relived the story of the bullock cart. Marakkar’s bullock cart, the trader from Hadramaut, the long journey to the plains, the trader’s daughter, what does her face look like, the fists she got, the healer, the green curtain at the entrance, marriage…
No, the healer, the green curtain at the entrance, fists again, lashes, marriage…
No, fists again, lashes, instructions for immediate wedding, consultation with the cart driver, marriage….
No, consultations, refusal, lure, marriage…
A bullock cart, wheels of gold, piles of gold blocks, a girl, a goldsmith…
Suhra was there, her grandfather Marakkar, he was also a boy.
A long journey to the plains, green plains, yellow plains, the bullock cart, no one to drive, passers by shouting…Suhra was not there. A yellow bag falling off from the cart…
Suhra was the yellow bag…
Shouting, howling…

TEA. That was her grandfather. Suhra jumped up from the chair. It was forbidden to her except for the siesta time when her grandfather would sleep and wait for a dream and she would tread the memories that ever were. “Tea”, the voice was unmistakably louder. As she ran to the kitchen, she noticed there was life behind her. He grandfather, after years of being content with the one window and half a room view his rocking chair offered, was slowly limping his way to the kitchen. “Fronds,” he shouted, “bundle up some fronds fast, make me a torch of it.” His voice was feverish. Casting aside tea plans for the moment, she rolled up a torch immediately, and lighted it by the kerosene lamp at the kitchen sill. Her grandfather grabbed it from her, ran to the tallest coconut tree, pulled himself up to the tip of the coconut tree though the raindrops dragged him down a few times, grabbed the crown of the tree by his left and waved the torch-bearing right violently, “here, here, here”.

And then, he came down, limping than ever, showed signs of fainting, and then signalled to Suhra to be carried to his bed. As she rested him on his bed, he told her in her ears, “I had the dream, they are ready to return it. They are on their way.”

Suhra hasn’t seen her uncles after that. In her hallucinations, her dead mother has taken the place of the trader’s daughter. The yellow bundle was taken by the two Arabs on the way. That evening they dropped in their house to give it back to her. They have been staying there ever since. Grandfather talked to them as if he knew them forever. Two Arabs, dressed in white tunics and chequered lungis. At times she felt they closely resembled her uncles, but they talked in her tongue, and talked of her past.

The red cigarette of Isabelle still eluded her. The beret, the blue gown, the chained hands, all looked down upon her with contempt. She had cut each part of that Eva Green poster, pasted it all in isolation, in different parts of the room, all beyond the reach of her hands, as if to remind herself of her own inferiority. Only her eyes could reach them. The cigarette-less Isabelle, with the crack extending from her lips to beyond her face, betrayed the mossy patches she tried to hide behind Isabelle’s feigned anguish and her golden brown hair. Today the contempt and naughtiness Isabelle’s downcast eyes emanated seemed to engulf her, as the elusive blue smoke of her un-ashed cigarette.

She had first fallen in love with that cigarette. Stuck between her lips, the redness was bleeding to plain ash, grunting, moaning through all the joys between her lips. Stuck to them; resolute not to fall off the tender hooks which still breathed life in her. The cigarette always looked away from her, as the glitter of parvenu from shanty existence. It was that unattainability that lured her to be one of its unseen fumes, to be puffed away, after the one deep inhale of reeking pleasure. It was that glamour of aloofness which led her to the mouth which smelled of secrets and forgetfulness and sounded of spring thunders.

If only forgetting was so easy.

On a wet September afternoon when her blue kurta still hugged her from the chillness of the just concluded rain, she felt at one with the glistening road, the fragrant earth, the reddish brown bricks and the shivering leaves, and he sat at a concrete side rail under the giant tree, a cigarette in one hand rested against the rail, while the other slowly scratched an imaginary line out of his face. She remembers that seeing him had at first tormented her, as if she was thrown out of an illusion of familiarity and oneness with the world and being the only one in the world, to an invisibility she couldn’t bear for its insignificance. His eyes were lost to scribbled images within himself, his fingers uncaring of the wet earth. If only he had touched the earth, if only its wetness had got to him, he would have noticed her as she would creep into him through earth’s veins. If only he had touched the earth, she would not have felt the need to conquer him, his sights, his probing touches.

It was still weeks before he first offered her a coffee. The lightning nights of late October reminded her of fury in nature, in herself. The clashes in the heaven, the numerous wings of Mikaaiyl and his army of angels, woke her up each night to flashes of crimson brightness in her abdomen piercing its way up as a band of misery around her forehead. A war demands a vanquisher. And honorable death.

The first time he invited her for a coffee her high pitched chirpiness was drowned in his silence. She spoke of her love for poetry, the turquoise floral print slippers at the nearest mall, the sleep inducing coffee versus the waking up coffee, the latest design on the ten rupee phone recharge coupon, her passion for collecting others’ stick-it notes from their doors… He smoked one cigarette, passed half of another to a friend.

The first time he spoke to her, he spoke something about a war and a book. He spoke to her about the air and fury, and she wanted to hear of the earth and its wetness. He spoke to her something about a thousand flowers; she wanted to hear about the oneness. He spoke of the cures of the future; she was still missing the familiarity of the past. Yet, he spoke very little, and she wanted to hear more.

The red beret on Isabelle jeered at her. If only forgetting was so easy.

The single coffee gave way to double coffee. He spoke about emancipation and body. She was puzzled how her body could be the end of the whole cosmos within her. He spoke of her headscarf, and being generous with shame that the world may drown in its own scriptures. She, of the written words’ life and inevitability. Now he spoke of oneness, she of difference.

On a cold December morning she deemed it unfair that an extra piece of cloth should separate her from millions of colder companions on earth. She felt the urge to be, once again, one with the world and with him within that one shroud of humanity, to dream together of warmer crimson skies. His sight will be hers now, and so will his probing touches.

Isabelle’s chained hand feigned captivity. In this war of sights and smells, the vanquished and vanquisher were just role plays.